Lee Badger

Lee W. Badger is the owner, director and leading designer-craftsman of Anvil Works®, in business since 1981. His life-long career as a self-employed artist-blacksmith began during the 1970's in Denver and the Colorado Rockies and brought him to the Mid-Atlantic and National Capital region in the late 1980's. He taught and worked as an artist-in-residence at Glen Echo National Park in suburban Washington, DC from 1989 to 1993. As the scope of his business increased, Lee began to seek a regionally central location where he could create a workshop of his own design. In 1998 he built the Anvil Works studio and metal workshop in Hedgesville, WV. As an artist and furniture maker, he is a member of The Furniture Society and the International Sculpture Center. He also belongs to national, regional and local blacksmith guilds and associations, and attends metalsmithing workshops and conferences wherever his interests may lead.

Artist's Website

Hedgesville, West Virginia

Sculptures

Sow Above, So Below - 2022

First card in a traditional Tarot deck, The Magician represents the ancient mystical principle “As Above, So Below.” This sculptural “card” portrays The Magician’s looping figure-eight infinity symbol with kinetic flipping heads, representing the way we endlessly spin together the threads of our lives from higher and lower influences. Our heads turn over and over creating an earthly reality from our higher thoughts and prayers.

Reel Thing - 2021

“A fisherman’s dream of walleye schooling in a column of water...In this underwater world, their shadowy shapes swim in and out, and several day’s catch are on the look-out for baitfish, a lure, or a darting jig. They’ve got a short attention span, but I can’t wait to land one in my pan!”

Fowl Ball II - 2020

Geese, ducks, turkeys and chickens are the descendants of dinosaurs that ruled the earth, but now we eat them. They had fierce and fearsome ancient ancestors, but today they can represent someone who’s silly, foolish, witless or cowardly.
Twenty-seven bird silhouettes form a sphere where the bird profiles become abstract disjointed shapes among random spaces in between. It’s a just-for-fun study of positive and negative spaces with equal emphasis on the solid forms and the empty shapes.
Get the Peckture? Quack you up!

Fowl Ball II - 2019

Cabinetree - 2018

Cabinetree contrasts the forces of Nature with the built environment we try to impose on her. We surround ourselves with engineered rectangular shapes and structures where straight lines, flat surfaces and right angles abound. But this rigid man-made geometry competes with the organic forms and curving contours of the natural world. Powers of the wild break through our efforts to straighten things out, square them up and box them in.